Freda Pov
I woke up gasping because my chest hurt so bad I thought I was dying. The pain squeezed around my heart and made it hard to breathe. I rolled onto my side, trying to make it stop, but nothing helped.
Then I looked down at my arms and froze.
Fresh claw marks ran from my elbows all the way to my wrists. Four deep scratches on each arm, like someone had dragged their nails down my skin as hard as they could. Blood was dried in the grooves, and some of the cuts were still bleeding a little.
"What happened?" I whispered and touched one of the marks. Pain shot up my arm, and I pulled my hand back fast.
I tried to remember last night, but everything was fuzzy. I remembered crying after Urdon left the room early again. I remembered lying in bed staring at the ceiling and feeling the mate bond get weaker in my chest. After that, everything went blank.
I got up and looked at my hands. There was dried blood under my fingernails. My blood, I had done this to myself, and I didn't even remember it.
My stomach turned, and I felt like I was going to be sick. I grabbed a long-sleeve shirt from the closet and pulled it on even though the fabric rubbed against the cuts and made them sting. Nobody could see these marks, nobody could know what I had done.
The pack healer lived in a cottage near the training grounds, so I walked there, keeping my head down. A few wolves said good morning to me, but I just nodded and kept walking. When I got to the cottage, I knocked on the door and waited.
The healer opened it and smiled. "Luna Freda," she said. "This is a surprise. Come in."
I went inside, and she closed the door behind me. Her cottage smelled like herbs and medicine and something sweet I couldn't identify. She gestured to a chair, and I sat down.
"What can I help you with?" she asked.
"Training accident," I said and rolled up my sleeves. "I fell yesterday during practice."
The healer took my arms and looked at the marks closely. Her fingers were gentle as she traced each scratch. She didn't say anything for a long time, and I started getting nervous.
"These are not from falling, Luna," she finally said in a quiet voice.
"Yes, they are," I said and tried to pull my arms away, but she held them.
"I have been a healer for thirty years," she said, and glanced at the door like she was checking if anyone could hear us. "I know what training wounds look like. These are different."
"Different how?" I said, even though I didn't want to know the answer.
She leaned closer and lowered her voice even more. "These wounds look like self-punishment from a cursed bond.
When the mate connection starts breaking, the Luna's wolf tries to claw out the pain. I have seen it before in very old cases."
My heart stopped beating for a second. "That is not real," I said. "Cursed bonds are just stories."
"I wish that were true," the healer said and let go of my arms. She turned away and started wrapping bandages. "I should not have said anything, forget I spoke, Luna. Please."
"No," I said and stood up. "Tell me what you know about cursed bonds."
"I cannot," she said, and her hands shook as she wrapped the bandages. "If the Alpha found out I was spreading stories about curses, he would exile me from the pack. I have a family, Luna. I cannot risk it."
"I am your Luna," I said. "I am ordering you to tell me."
She shook her head hard. "I am sorry, I cannot help you with this. Take the bandages and go. Please."
I grabbed the bandages from her hands and left without saying anything else. My whole body was shaking as I walked across the pack grounds. If the healer knew about cursed bonds, then maybe there was information somewhere. Maybe I could find proof.
The old library was on the other side of the pack house in a building that nobody used anymore. Most wolves didn't even know it existed because we had a new library now with computers and modern books. But the old one had records going back hundreds of years.
The door was stuck when I tried to open it. I had to pull with both hands and put my foot against the wall for leverage. Finally, it scraped open, and I went inside.
Everything smelled like dust and mold. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling, and the windows were so dirty that barely any light came through. I found a section labeled pack history and started pulling down books.
Most of them fell apart when I touched them. The pages were yellow and brittle, and some of them crumbled into dust in my hands. But I kept searching until I found a book with a black leather cover that had no title on it.
I opened it carefully and saw drawings of women. Under each drawing was a name, dates, and notes about how they died. Luna Sarah scratched out her own eyes in 1847. Luna Margaret walked into the forest in 1903 and was never found. Luna Elizabeth tried to kill her Alpha during a ceremony in 1965 and was executed by the pack.
"They all went mad," I whispered.
I kept reading, and my hands started shaking harder. Every Luna in this book had hurt herself or someone else. Every single one had shown signs of the mate bond breaking before they lost control completely.
Then I turned the page and saw a drawing that made me stop breathing.
It was a chest tattoo exactly like the one Urdon had. The same design with the wolf and the moon, and the symbols I didn't understand, but in this drawing, there were black chains wrapped around the tattoo. The chains squeezed a bleeding heart in the center, and drops of blood fell down the chest.
Under the drawing, it said "the mark of the generational curse passed from father to son in the Alpha bloodline."
I read the words three times to make sure I understood them right. Urdon had this curse in his blood. His father had it, and his grandfather before that. Every Alpha in his family line carried this mark, and every Luna they mated with went insane because of it.
"This is real," I said and closed the book. "This is actually real."